Category: Life

The Stories of My Office Toys

B, Disney, Life, Memories, Photos, Toys

As you probably read on TheAngelForever.com, we saw Toy Story 3 on Sunday. It was a powerful movie and it is quite amazing how Pixar keeps topping themselves. I keep thinking "There’s no way they’ll beat this" and then they go and beat it. I won’t spoil anything but I don’t think that it’s a spoiler to mention that the movie is about Andy going to college and what happens to his once-beloved toys when he goes. The toys long for playtime and Andy just keeps them in a toy chest, forgotten and unplayed with.

A few days ago, I looked through my office. I have quite a collection of toys, momentos, pictures and other assorted items that I’ve collected over the years. Most of them have some sort of sentiment attached to them. Let’s go on a tour, shall we?

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Starting from the left and heading right is the head of Dilbert’s boss. This is actually a "silly slammer." You hit it and it says things like "I’m the boss. It doesn’t have to make sense!" Then there’s Tigger and Pluto from our Disney World honeymoon. Behind them is Humphrey the Bear who was given to us by a Disney World tour guide upon finding out we were newlyweds on our honeymoon. Behind him is a canner penguin from a trip to Montreal we took prior to being married. Behind that is a Long Island Ducks rubber duckie. The Ducks are a baseball team near where my parents live.

Moving on we find the characters from Lilo and Stitch, another Disney movie I loved. Behind them is a Homer Simpson Pez dispenser, Mickey in a car, Dilbert and Dogbert. After them is a stuffed Hershey bar from when we visited Hershey, PA. The photos are B at our wedding and B and I with Mickey on our honeymoon. Finally, there’s the M&M guys from a trip to the M&Ms store in Las Vegas just before finding out B was pregnant with NHL.

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Here we have a Mickey/Minnie wedding couple. You can wind them up and they dance. We got them at Disney during our honeymoon. Then there’s Winnie the Pooh in a cow costume. He was handed to us with Humphrey. In the back is Dr. Evil and Mini-Me along with Dr. Evil’s cat. Next to them is a box with Thing 1 and Thing 2. Besides being Dr. Seuss characters, they are also one of our nicknames for the boys. B and the boys gave me this. In the front are various snowglobes and momentos from trips to Mystic Seaport, Boston, Sesame Place, Hershey and Niagra Falls. There’s also a Disney World photo holder from our last Disney Trip (currently sans photo) and a Yoda/Darth Vader mirror toy. (You look in one end and it’s Yoda, look in the other and it’s Vader.)

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That crystal and the little "eye guys" are from our trip to Howe Caverns while B was pregnant with NHL. Behind them is a penguin keepsake from our trip to Montreal. Next to them are my Farscape guys: John Crichton, Zhaan, Scorpious (with shrunken Hynerian head), Chianna, and D’Argo. They’re joined by Gandalf and Shrek. Quite the combination, huh?

Not pictured (mainly because he hasn’t been dusted in far too long) is a Spiderman toy perched on a Gargoyle affixed to my wall.  A web head covered in cobwebs is irony not laziness, right?

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On top of my computer resides an Easy Button, Super Grover and Oscar from our trip to Sesame Place, a talking C-3PO that I picked up from a going-out-of-business KB Toys, Photographer Goofy from last year’s Disney World trip and a couple of DRDs who wandered away from the other Farscape guys.

 

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Finally, there’s the front of my desk where I have my "Judge Me By My Size" Yoda from our most recent Disney World trip, the first photo of B that she sent me (along with the note she wrote me after we were engaged) and a pinscreen.

And that concludes my tour of my office toys/momentos. Getting back to Toy Story 3, I can’t help but wonder, when I shut the lights off at night, do my toys come alive and have parties?

Plans Set In… Clay?

Life

I’m the kind of guy who likes having things planned out. I’m not very good at “just winging it.” Still, if fatherhood has taught me anything it’s that you always need to be flexible and plans are never set in stone. You never know when a little one will get a cold and shatter your perfectly formed plan.

Take this weekend, for example. I had a great Father’s Day in mind as the weekend approached. We would wake up early and go strawberry picking. For dinner, we would go a great, local Chinese restaurant. On Saturday, we went to the Great Escape (more on that later). Coming home, it was late and JSL fell asleep. Then we stopped by Dunkin’ Donuts for a very late dinner and he woke up… and stayed up until midnight! Then, he woke us up at 4:40am to come into our bed just as a huge thunderstorm erupted. There, he hogged bed space until 6am when his big brother woke up.

I set NHL up on the couch with the Roku remote to be entertained by Rugrats on Netflix until we were all more rested. Then, I fell back to an uneven sleep-wake up cycle until B left the bed. I laid in bed with my eyes closed knowing what was coming up and yet savoring my last moments of lying down before beginning the day.

B and the boys came in and all wished me a happy Father’s Day, gave me some cards and presents. I got a Star Wars “book” (it’s a series of cards connected at one point so they can swivel around). I’ll use these while watching Star Wars with NHL. I also got some pajama bottoms and a coupon book from NHL (good for vacuuming, doing the dishes, and learning about computers with me).

After getting up, getting dressed, eating breakfast and checking our house for damage/leaks from the previous night’s storm (nothing, thank goodness), we talked about our Father’s Day plans. I really wanted to go strawberry picking, but my trip outside showed me two things. First of all, it was hot and humid. Secondly, it was muddy out. Having the boys walk through hot, muddy fields to get a ton of berries was probably not the best idea. (Especially when I would be the one tubbing them that night!)

NHL was actually the one to suggest an alternative plan. He said we could go bowling. Most lanes seemed to be closed on Sundays, but we found one that wasn’t. Before bowling, though, we needed to eat lunch. The place I had wanted to go to was completely out of the way, so we did what we’ve learned to do since becomming parents, adapted our plans to the situation. We went out to a local chinese buffet and had a pretty good lunch. NHL even tried two new things (black bean buns and edamame) and loved them.

We went bowling and, while I’ll post details later, we all had a great time. After bowling, we stopped by BJ’s to pick up some things and went to B’s parents’ house for dinner.

Father’s Day turned out to be a lot of fun even if none of my planned activities got accomplished. That’s life and parenting, though. You can either learn to roll with the punches and have fun with the new plans or you gripe about your messed up plans and miss all the fun that it happening right in front of you.

P.S. Even this blog post was a “roll with the punches” thing. I originally intended to post about Six Flags or bowling with photos, but realized I had uploaded the wrong set of photos. So I needed to post about something else until I get to the photos on my computer at home.

Of Plans and Pipes

Life, Photos

I had planned on a blog post today showcasing a sandwich I made called The Veggie Elvis. It would have been the first in a Cooking With TechyDad series featuring peanut butter (specifically Peanut Butter & Company peanut butter) as the featured ingredient. Unfortunately, I was a little distracted with a burst pipe leaking water all over my basement. I’m not going to recount the whole story, B did that quite nicely, but I will add bits and pieces to it.

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My Bullied History, Part 5 – Recovery

Bullies, Life, School

Towards the end of high school, after the teasing had stopped due to my friend’s intervention, I attended a social event. I forget the reason for the event except that it might have been due to me being introducted into some kind of honor society. During the event, I noticed two things. First of all, I didn’t talk with anyone other than my parents even though I really wanted to. Secondly, I kept backing myself up to the wall. Simply being around that many people talking with each other made me so uncomfortable that I felt like I needed to push myself into the wall to escape. Even though I recognized that I was doing this, I couldn’t stop myself.

It was quite clear what was happening. My years of being bullied might have been over, but they had taken their toll. I had a big fear of socializing. I would get extremely self-conscious whenever I was in public. I guess part of the problem was that I felt like I had to be constantly on the defensive. As if the slightest show of emotion, the slightest display of vulnerability, the slightest opening up would be greeted with mocking, jeering and name calling. Even if I knew intellectually that the person I was talking to wasn’t going to do all that to me, some part of my brain regarded every other human as a threat to be avoided.

As I entered college, I made a conscious decision to change this. I joined a club whose sole purpose was to throw parties. I put myself into social situations. I spoke with new people. I even attempted dating. (I didn’t have any luck, but at least I tried.) All to try to get myself to feeling like I was “normal” in social situations.

Still, recovering from bullying gave me a sense of freedom in a weird way. I found I didn’t really care what people thought of me. While it did have bad points (such as keeping a beard for way too long when everyone told me it made me look old), it had its good moments as well. For example, one day G and I were eating in the cafeteria. Two girls approached us and whispered that they were sorry but they were pledging a sorority and had to serenade us as part of the initiation. Now, I could have been embarrassed and self-conscious. I could have thought that we were being picked on for one reason or another. In fact, G seemed quite embarrassed by the whole situation. I, strangely, found myself enjoying it. I figured that it wouldn’t be every day that I’d be serenaded by a pair of good looking girls (no matter what the motive) and I might as well enjoy it.

A few years ago, my high school reunion invitation arrived. I thought about going. My life was going well. I had a beautiful wife, two wonderful children and a job I loved. I was hoping to see my former tormenters miserable in their lives. When I saw how much my reunion was going to cost, I began to rethink attending. At first, it pained me that I wasn’t going to get the chance to rub my good life into their faces. Then I realized that I didn’t need to prove anything to my former tormenters. My life was good. I I had people who loved and depended on me. Whether or not those bullies saw my good life was completely irrelevant. For too long, the fear of them hung in the shadowy corners of my mind. Once I realized that I didn’t care about them anymore, the phantoms disappeared. I was happy with my life, with my family and most of all with myself. That was good enough for me.

In the end, I think that this will be a lesson that I pass on to NHL (and eventually JSL). It doesn’t matter what people say about you. If people try to put you down or make you feel like you aren’t good enough, tune them out. You needn’t do anything to prove them wrong. In the end, what really matters is what you think of yourself.

My Bullied History, Part 4 – The Essay

Bullies, Life, School

As I said last week, during my first semester of college, I was taking Creative Writing and decided to write about my High School experiences.  The following is the essay in it’s entirety.  This was painful for me to read even though it has been nearly 2 decades since I left High School.  The events in this essay are entirely true (except for some name changes… my name’s not Alan) and really happened to me.  (Including the recurring dream.)  I may have mashed events together a bit for the sake of the story, but I think it gives a really good look into my mind at the time. » Read more

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